by Chris Thrall
“Who says racism’s only for white folks.” She handed Hans his beer.
“Probably not so much racism but a distinct dislike of spoilt tourists,” Hans replied, having witnessed this kind of behavior before.
If it weren’t for recent events, both would have got a kick out of being off the beaten track. As it was, they were happy when Amado arrived, bursting out of a Hawaiian shirt and driving what must have been his own dusty white jalopy.
“Hans, Miss Penny.” He shook hands and sat down, still looking as flustered as the time they met him at the airport. “Boy!” He clicked his fingers at the barman, who dropped the ashtray he was wiping and ran over to their table.
Hans felt a touch of panic, worrying this notable difference in service was to do with Amado being a police officer and that the meeting wasn’t as hush-hush as he’d hoped. But he soon relaxed, remembering it was Africa’s class system in play, Amado having a significantly lighter skin tone than his compatriot.
“Three more beers,” Amado spat in English over his shoulder, purposely not giving the barman his full attention. Then, “Hans, I gather you spoke with Mr. Davenport about a man named Logan.”
“And?” Hans remained noncommittal.
“I’m sorry, Hans. I did not mean to interrogate you. Just to say that a search of Logan’s place turned up nothing of any significance. We took a load of paperwork and a computer away to see if our detectives can come up with—”
“You’ll be wasting your time.” Hans’ tone spoke for him.
“Yes, yes, exactly.” Amado mopped his brow with a handkerchief, then took a slug of beer. “I am throwing myself at your mercy, Hans.”
From the bags under Amado’s eyes, they could see he was exhausted.
“Barbosa, my mercy has pretty much drawn a blank,” said Hans. “You’re the insider here. You must have come up with something.”
“We have a lot of people on this case. Interpol are guiding us through the process, and we have the British police lending support.”
“But?” Hans spoke into the neck of his bottle before taking a swig.
“Friends, I was born and brought up on these islands. I’ve been a police officer for twenty-six years. I have a good idea of the people who are responsible for abducting your daughter, but there are other powers at work.”
“Other powers?” said Hans.
Amado squirmed, gripping his thighs and scanning the empty bar. “Yes, other.” He put his hand down by the side of the table and made the sign of the horns.
Hans nodded and gave Penny an I’ll explain later look.
“You must understand, Hans, these are evil people in high places who are not about to let a tired old cop expose them. They play by their own rules, and my life means nothing to them.” He wrung his hands, attempting to look apologetic.
“Amado, if you don’t tell me who this is, then I will kill you.” Hans’ face darkened as he leaned over the table. “And that’s whether I get my daughter back or not.”
“If after a lifetime in law enforcement I cannot do my rightful job, then there is no point to live. So please, I will approach my superiors one last time – later today – and if I don’t get the right response I will tell you everything. This is my promise. But I have a question for you.”
“Shoot.” Hans reached down for Penny’s hand, and she squeezed it in return.
“In your inquiries, have you come across this woman?”
He passed them a profile picture taken off a website. Penny looked at it for no more than a second before shrugging and shaking her head. Hans had no idea either.
“Her name is Brenda Umchima, the manager of an orphanage in Gambia. She’s on Cape Verde attempting to make contact with os traficantes, er—”
“The traffickers,” Penny muttered.
“How do you know all this?” asked Hans.
“Our vice squad pulled in a girl last night, a fourteen-year-old prostitute from the slums. Her pimp ran off and left the poor kid terrified. She – how you say? – squawked, no?”
Hans nodded.
“Said she had information if we released her from the cells and gave us this woman.” He nodded to the photograph. “She’s looking for a contact in the trafficking and staying at the Pensão Lisboa.”
“Have you checked her out?” Hans asked.
“There’s nothing on record for Umchima, either local or international, so I searched the Internet and found her details on a website for a children’s home in Kankaba.”
“Did you pull in the pimp?”
“Calls himself Cobra Azul – Blue Snake. My detective traced him to a house in the slums, but his kid sisters hadn’t seen him. We have an informant living two doors down who’s going to let us know if he returns.”
“Is your informant reliable?” said Hans.
“When it comes to crack addicts, they’re more reliable than anyone when a bribe’s at stake.”
“Can I take that picture?”
“Sure.” Amado pushed it across the table.
- 68 -
Brenda Umchima awoke late in the humble hotel room. She groped under the pillow for her switchblade, dropped it into her toiletry bag and headed for the shower. If everything went to plan, the traffickers would be onto her already, although she didn’t feel in danger at present. Skilled in the art of subterfuge, these people wouldn’t neutralize a player without first ascertaining their identity to establish the level of threat that existed.
Umchima posed no danger to the traffickers. She was exactly the sort of twisted individual they sought to do business with, someone with a conflict of identity resulting from a lifetime of oppression through being different, someone feeling bitter, insecure and unworthy. Brenda Umchima had been victimized all her life for her skin and eye color and mixed parentage, her Mozambican father branded an outsider in Mali who got lucky by marrying a rich, white toubab wife.
Umchima threw open the louver doors to the balcony and stepped outside into glorious sunshine. She stretched her arms above her head and yawned in a show of obliviousness and contentment, yet immediately spotted the man in a shiny black BMW attempting to park innocuously – though failing miserably in this impoverished borough – a few yards up the street.
The Malian went back into the room, grinning in satisfaction. She had her in, and being the manager of a shabby orphanage in the back end of beyond was about to pay dividends. Purposely leaving the balcony doors open, she placed the laptop containing information about her role in the orphanage on the rough wooden table and left the Pensão Lisboa for a celebratory brunch.
Walking in the direction of the new town, Umchima took out a compact and dabbed her cheeks with foundation. She hardly ever wore makeup – with frizzy brown hair bleached into highlights by the African sun, and stunning blue eyes accentuated by golden skin and natural eyebrows, she possessed a beauty a lot of women yearn for – but the compact’s mirror allowed her a snatch view of the BMW’s occupant. It was a bald tough guy with a goatee beard who looked as though he’d been around the block a few times.
Fifty yards from the hotel, she noticed a white man and woman sat chatting in a jeep parked on the other side of the road. It had a yellow Hertz rental logo on the license plate, piquing her interest, since this wasn’t a tourist area. She made a mental note of the registration number and hailed a cab, wishing to put time and distance between her and the hotel, for it wasn’t hard to predict the trafficker’s next move.
“Here,” Umchima told the cabdriver as they pulled onto Praia’s seafront, having picked the first establishment advertising breakfast.
She ordered a cachupa stew of bananas, vegetables, pork sausage and bacon, and to calm her nerves, a bottle of local beer.
The meal arrived, but with a million thoughts occupying her mind, Umchima had no appetite. She reflected on her past, the orphanage and the Trade, running through an escape plan in case things turned sour. She reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and took out her cell phone but
paused, as if realizing something, then went up to the bar and asked the barman the whereabouts of the restroom. When the Malian returned, she sat back down and made a call.
After an hour and two more beers, Umchima stopped pushing lumps of banana and sausage around the plate and paid the check. At the Pensão Lisboa, she walked past the sleeping concierge, who remained blissfully unaware of events going on around him, and went up to her room. Upon opening the door, she smiled. The laptop was missing from the rough wooden table.
- 69 -
While Penny typed “Pensão Lisboa, Praia” into the satnav, Hans drove toward the city. He didn’t hold out much hope that tracking down Brenda Umchima would turn up any new leads – with respect to the Trade, she was obviously looking for a connection herself – but with nothing else on his detective itinerary, he thought he might as well check her out.
The area the satnav directed them to cast further doubt. Any person staying in a run-down location such as this had to be a chancer attempting to make a fanciful buck.
“Rua Michelle, next left.” Penny pointed at the satnav screen, its synthesized voice telling them to turn into the street and that the destination was on the right.
“Would have been quite the place in its day,” Hans mused, taking in the rotting palm trees along Rua Michelle’s central reservation, their drooping fronds blackened by car fumes and volcanic dust.
“Agreed,” said Penny, eyeing the gray, cracked whitewash on the palms’ once-dazzling trunks and the forlorn state of the colonial buildings.
“That’s the place there.” Hans pointed out the old hotel, stopping the jeep fifty yards before it.
“What’s the plan?” Penny pulled down the sun visor.
“I was hoping you had one.” Hans sighed, staring at the hotel’s entrance, awaiting inspiration.
“Oh honey.” She buried her head in his neck.
Hans looked at the photograph Amado had taken off the orphanage’s website. “I guess we wait and see if this woman turns up. Perhaps something will come to me.”
They didn’t have to wait long. Hans tapped Penny on the leg as he spotted a beautiful bronze-skinned woman with frizzy, sun-bleached brown hair leave the building. She began walking at a brisk pace in their direction but on the other side of the street.
“Okay, pretend we’re chatting, but hide your face behind me,” said Hans, turning his back to the window as the woman passed.
“She’s flagging down a cab.” Penny realized she was whispering, watching the action out of the corner of her eye.
“Is this one stopping?” Hans asked calmly as a taxi drove by.
“Yes, she’s getting inside.”
“Then I guess we should follow.”
Hans fired up the engine and made a U-turn through a gap in the red-and-white-striped curbstones protecting the palm beds. Keeping a discreet distance, he tailed the cab to the seafront, where its driver stopped at the first restaurant and let the woman out.
Hans pulled up behind a parked truck a hundred yards away. He waited until the woman entered the establishment and took a seat at a table out front and then fetched the sniper spotting scope from the rucksack in the trunk and ditched the package of crap in the nearest garbage bin.
“Well, she’s not stupid,” Hans remarked as he observed through the scope. “She’s sitting in a chair facing the sidewalk.”
“Do you think she’s expecting someone?” asked Penny.
“No, she’s keeping an eye on anyone walking past or entering the place. She’s taken the table nearest the bar so no one can sit behind her.”
“She could be paranoid,” Penny remarked with a giggle.
“You know what they say about paranoia?” said Hans.
“Go on.”
“If you think you’re paranoid, you probably have every reason to be.”
Hans watched as the woman reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and took out a cell phone. She paused, as if remembering something, then went up to the bar, spoke briefly to the barman and disappeared into the back. When she returned, she sat back down and made a call.
Clever, Hans mused, but didn’t say anything.
There was nothing to gain by observing the woman any longer, and Hans didn’t want to risk her seeing the jeep a second time, so he U-turned and drove back to the villa, needing peace and quiet and time to think. He also needed a beer, plus both of them were hungry, having skipped breakfast.
- 70 -
For the umpteenth time in three days, Brenda Umchima walked out onto the balcony to check the street below.
Bingo!
The BMW had returned, looking completely out of place on the forlorn boulevard, confirming the thickset bald guy in the driver’s seat was a trafficker and that Umchima had her in.
She left the hotel and crossed the street. The trafficker held the door open, and she climbed into the backseat. Once she was inside, he turned and shoved a pistol in her face.
“He wants to meet you, but if you fuck with us, then this bullet has your name on it. Entiendes?”
“Sí,” the woman told the Spaniard – of course she understood. But as they drove east along the coast road, she still contemplated how to kill him if things turned nasty – a stranglehold or simply sticking the switchblade into his neck or through an eye socket.
A couple of miles from the city the man pulled over and, with a wave of the pistol, ordered Umchima out. He patted her down at the roadside, finding the cell phone, switchblade, her passport and a small wallet. He smiled at the stiletto – a precaution he could relate to – then placed it in his pocket and thumbed through the contents of the wallet. There were business cards with her contact details at the orphanage stamped on them in simple black lettering, a Visa debit card, a Gambian driving license and some of the money she’d converted at the airport. He handed everything back to Umchima but the switchblade, then took a black hood from the driver’s-door compartment and pulled it roughly over her head.
“In,” he ordered, forcing her to lie down on the backseat.
Umchima expected this and wasn’t overly concerned. She began counting to sixty in her head, making a note of the minutes that passed with her fingers and concentrating on the changes in the road surface and gradient and the car’s turns. After an uphill climb, meaning they were heading inland, she heard the crunch of rubber on gravel and sensed from the lack of breeze and an echo that they had entered a large enclosed forecourt.
“Out.”
The trafficker manhandled her from the car and into a building, slamming a heavy door behind them. It was cool inside. Umchima felt solid stone tiles under her feet and smelled the odor of antique furnishings. She guessed it was a precolonial build and the owner an established figure not short of money – hardly surprising with the revenue the Trade generated.
The man grabbed her arm and shoved her along a long hall, down a flight of steep steps into a room she sensed was small and windowless. Having steered her into a chair, he pulled off the blindfold. Another man – sprightly, with slicked-back white hair and a short-clipped gray beard – sat in the feeble glow of a bare lightbulb. He stared at her across a simple metal-framed office desk. With the exception of two chairs, there was no other furniture in the room, only an expensive-looking computer, which seemed out of place in the damp and moldy surroundings.
Curiosity evident in his birdlike eyes, her host remained silent a while before speaking in near-perfect but accented English.
“So, you have met Fernando. He is – how can we say? – my butler, chauffeur, aide-de-camp. Naturally, he is also somewhat protective of our little operation and of me, no? He was once Sargento Chavez, when he and I were soldiers. We have been through rather a lot together. Er, English is okay?”
“English, Portuguese, French, Bambara, Mandinka . . .”
“If we are to do business together, I feel it is best to use English. Besides, my Mandinka is a little rusty, no?” He smiled. “But tell me, how come the manager of an orphanage
in Gambia speaks so many languages?”
“How do you know I’m the manager of an orphanage in Gambia?”
The man reached into a drawer and held up her laptop. “I have taken the liberty of reading your files and Internet history. It all checks out – but for security you shouldn’t leave yourself logged into your email.”
He handed the laptop to Umchima and then turned his computer’s screen around to show the orphanage’s webpage.
“Then you will know from my staff profile I was born in Mali to an American mother and Mozambican father – and of course it helps to speak French in a French-speaking country.”
“Yes, yes, but we couldn’t find any official records relating to your parents, only an entry for you on the Ministry of Justice’s website. It hasn’t been updated since 2011 – I’m assuming because of the collapse of democracy following the rebel takeover.”
“Correct. My parents were Christian missionaries, murdered in the initial uprising when the Islamists forced sharia law on the North. As a government official I was on the Tuareg’s kill list, so I escaped through Senegal to seek asylum in Gambia.”
“Terrible, terrible,” the man muttered. “But tell me, if your mother was American, why you did not flee to the USA on your American passport?”
“I’ve never owned an American passport,” Umchima spoke with venom. “I am African, and I will live and die in Africa. When the fighting is over, I will retake my rightful place in government and work to rebuild my country.”
“It’s okay,” said the man, his smile warming as the conversation unfolded. “I know you don’t have a US passport – I have contacts in high places. But tell me, why do you want to trade in los niños?”
“Children – why not? What other life can they have? When they leave the orphanage, someone will try to exploit them for financial gain – either that or they’ll end up living on the street with a drug problem, prostituting themselves to survive. I know that you have the connections to send them to a new life in Europe.”
